“People in these different buckets are interacting with one another, and every time a susceptible person bumps into an infected person, there’s a probability of transmission,” said Ron Brookmeyer, a biostatistician and dean of the University California, Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health. “This plays out in this simulation over time, day by day, and you can see the infection spreading.”

U.S. testing for the virus has been expanded, and that has probably contributed to the increasing rate of confirmed infections. But it doesn’t explain the entire increase, said Dr. Zuo-Feng Zhang, a public health researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles. “This increase is not because of testing. It’s a real increase,” he said.

Being able to ride, or run, or walk, is crucial for both physical and mental health, Dr. Richard J. Jackson, a noted public health expert who grew up in Nutley, told me over the phone from California. Jackson, a professor emeritus at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health who was director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, is a longtime advocate of public policies and infrastructure that promote biking and walking as means of curbing obesity and heart disease while cutting automobile emissions that contribute to climate change.

In all the progressive initiatives currently underway in California, Jim Newton, a lecturer in public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, sees an abiding tension between accelerated momentum toward Democratic goals and a constrained ability to finance them. “Going back to a normal in which those problems just return doesn’t feel acceptable, particularly to the left,” Mr. Newton said. But the crisis, he said, “both emphasizes the needs and highlights the big price tag.”

(Column written by UCLA’s Jonathan Kuntz) Movies were a toy invented in Thomas Edison’s lab, exploited as a novelty in vaudeville, and spread by nickelodeons. But movies as the world knows them, grand features with glamorous stars, the greatest of popular cultures, were a creation of Hollywood, specifically folks like Adolph Zukor and William Fox, with the invaluable assistance of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. Their smash hit business model, the “golden age of cinema,” involved mass production studios cranking out weekly feature programs, with distribution to theaters in every neighborhood, that created a dominant national (and eventually international) culture.

The air quality Californians are enjoying during the stay-at-home order could one day be the status quo, if the state follows the instructions of a UCLA study published Monday. The study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, offers a road map to state and local policymakers for California to use existing policies and technologies to drastically decrease greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution by 2050, according to Yifang Zhu, one of the study’s lead authors and a professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

Dana Hunnes, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D., a senior dietitian at the University of California Los Angeles Medical Center, told Healthline that she expects each part of the country to be affected differently by their own unique disruptions in food production. “For example, some states may see a shortage in pork while others are seeing shortages in beef. Either way, it is tragic that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of animals will be euthanized — hopefully more humanely than what happens in slaughterhouses,” she explained. “What a waste of resources and life.”

Promising new research from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), suggests an old schizophrenia drug could significantly enhance the efficacy of radiation treatment for one of the deadliest forms of brain cancer.... “Many preclinical glioblastoma studies report fairly small increases in overall survival in mice, and that rarely translates into benefits for patients,” explains [UCLA’s] Frank Pajonk, senior author on the new study. “But here we see pretty drastic effects in improved overall survival, and I find that very encouraging. It gives us hope that this is all going to translate into a benefit for people.”

The legalization and decriminalization of marijuana in California and elsewhere have made marijuana detection especially important, said senior author Neil Garg, UCLA’s Kenneth N. Trueblood Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and chair of UCLA’s department of chemistry and biochemistry.… “We want a simple breathalyzer that doesn’t require specialized training because a police officer is not a trained synthetic organic chemist,” said lead author Evan Darzi, a former postdoctoral scholar in Garg’s laboratory.

(Column written by UCLA’s Tom Nunan) With today’s confirmation by NASA that Tom Cruise will be the first actor to film a major motion picture in space, Cruise’s “down to earth” descriptor will necessarily have to be revised. Instead, Cruise is growing closer to becoming an actual space oddity.

Even when laboratories are reopened, it may take months to a year for research to resume as normal. “I have [new hires] in the lab that haven’t even met each other physically,” said Alice Soragni, a cancer researcher and assistant professor who runs a lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There is a lot of training that needs to have happened that hasn’t happened,” she added.

“I think it was very interesting how the president responded to that question, which was ‘We can’t keep the country closed for five years,’” said UCLA’s Anne Rimoin. “So … should we be keeping this task force going? My response is yes, we should be keeping the task force going because we need to have national strategy for how we are going to keep moving forward in this pandemic.” (Approx. 4:30 mark. Rimoin was also interviewed on MSNBC.)

“Many states that reopened economies are still seeing rising COVID-19 cases and deaths. Reopening may lead to sharp increase in new cases and local outbreaks, which may cause significant rise of nationwide COVID-19 cases and deaths,” [said] Zhang Zuofeng, professor of epidemiology and associate dean for research with the school of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“We are seeing the future in real time. I think this session (at AACR) will be remembered for when we saw the big data (showing) that these assays should be broadly applicable provided they have the appropriate regulatory-agency approval. This will not take that long and it will change our practice,” said Dr. [Antonio] Ribas of the University of California, Los Angeles.